A
backlash against computers and “computer culture” has been long overdue,
though, typically, it’s too little and too late. Even the most adamant
luddites would have to admit that the computer is here to stay, if not
quite in the form we recognize now.

Concordia
University academics Arthur and Marilouise Kroker have written about computers
and their effect on culture before, in books like Hacking the Future
and Data Trash, and not without ambivalence. With Digital Delirium,
however, they seem intent on upping the ante, enlisting a range of academics,
cultural theorists, sci-fi writers and technologists to articulate a broad
sense of unease about what seems an impending supersaturation of data and
connectivity into the cultural, social, economic and physical fibre of
our current reality and imminent future.

I, for
one, wish the bet had paid off, but unfortunately, Digital Delirium
is a confused rattle-bag of often barely articulate speculation and hard-ridden
intellectual hobby horses that does little to explain any notion of “computer
culture”, or a culture reliant on computing, that isn’t abstruse, obtuse,
or banal.

The contributions
are organized into five sections, each of which is meant to elaborate on
a facet or “concept” of “digital” culture. The Krokers lead off with a
tour of San Francisco, a city they imagine as being on the fringe of empirical
reality and the beginning of an alternate, silicon-coded empire of emerging
economics and evolving new social structures. It’s hard to peer past the
purple, hyperbolic prose and see anything but a typical First World city,
struggling with its contradictions as lightning changes in economic structures
exist alongside the old urban dilemmas of race and wealth distribution.

We’ve always
been trying to make sense of these seemingly intractable problems, and
the solution the Krokers have arrived at - which Arthur Kroker first attempted
in force with Data Trash - is to pile on the adjectives and tack
on every cliche inspired by media rhetoric, in the hope that the momentum
generated by so much allusion will hammer home an argument that relies
more on inference than persuasive ideas. Listening to a group of street
musicians riff on Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay”, “we know that we have
mutated beyond music, and are present at a dirge, SF style: end of the
continent, end of the road, end of the body, end of life, end of hope.
It’s just that moment when a song becomes a lament, and the city streets
are a dance of the disposessed.” Poetic, yes, and powerful in its
invocation of apocalypse, but really nothing more than a moment’s musing
on a street corner, in a city not your own.

The Krokers
have written, not surprisingly, on Beaudrillard and the French semioticians
and cultural theorists of his circle. Digital Delirium contains
both a short article by him and an interview with the “philosopher of signs”.
With a short interview with fellow cultural theorist Paul Virilio separating
the two, the Krokers seem to place the musings of Beaudrillard at a locus
in the book, a point from which it all opens out. This is a shame, since
while there is much in Digital Delirium that seems cogent and inspired,
the Beaudrillard section is of typical opacity and tortuous verbal gymnastics:
“And this is where the clockwork breaks down, because the absorption of
all this, by the resonance of the sounding board on which it falls, as
it is completely perturbed, falsified, mediatised, this anticipated absorption,
through the precession of whatever you do, that is what distresses me.”
Come again?

Beaudrillard
is responding to a question about Susan Sontag’s theatre work in a war-ravaged
Sarajevo, but obviously the very real circumstances of such work - the
loaded critique of the whole political nightmare of Bosnia that staging
“Waiting for Godot” in a war zone implies (in spite of what one may think
of its appropriateness - might not real aid have been more welcome?) -
means little to him. His “distress” is a highly-bred creature, more comfortable
with raging at the shadows of meaning and the echoes of real problems.

There are
some fine contributions to Digital Delirium. Sci-fi writer Bruce
Sterling’s long essay, re-evaluating over ten years of both hype and progress
since the birth of “cyberspace”, is sobering in its disillusioned assesment
of our spiralling infatuation with “virtuality”, and ends with a call for
a return to grappling with the grief and confusion of reality.

It was
probably a mistake to put an interview with Slovenian writer Slavoj Zizek
immediately after Beaudrillard’s, as straightforward and commonsensical
as Zizek sounds next to Beaudrillard's gnomic utterances. Reflecting on
the popularity of nascent “virtual reality” in porn, Zizek points out that
people have always used their imaginations to enhance the prosaic act of
sex; of course they have, you think,

Elsewhere,
there are interesting pieces on the transmission of UFO mythology through
popular culture, and the dynamics of the Godzilla film and an attendant
Japanese obsession with the destruction/reconstruction of Tokyo.
The latter piece might be one of the few examples of the theory of deconstruction
brought lightly into play in an elegant, discursive manner. Unfortunately,
these are bright spots in a collection where the sum of the parts do not
add up to a satisfying whole.